In Awe didn't begin as a course.
It began as a moment.

There's a moment — maybe you've had it, maybe you're in it right now — where you feel the full weight of the line connecting your past to your child's future, running straight through your body, straight through right now. And the weight of it, the sheer sacred weight of it, lands all at once like a hand on your shoulder. Everything is suddenly that important. Everything always was.

It's not the pregnancy. You know about the pregnancy. You've read the books, downloaded the apps, googled things at 2:00 a.m. that you immediately regretted googling. You know about the physical part, the medical part, the practical part. Someone, somewhere, has explained all of that to you before, or you're finding it now.

I mean the other thing. The thing underneath.

The holy-shit-this-is-the-most-important-thing-in-the-world-and-I-have-no-idea-how-to-prepare-for-it thing. The who-am-I-becoming thing. The what-do-I-do-with-everything-I-was-handed thing. The I-love-this-child-so-ferociously-it-frightens-me-and-the-world-is-on-fire thing.

That thing. Nobody prepares you for that.

I was heavily pregnant, looking out at rolling green hills, grateful for the breeze in the humid air, while the world moved around me, and I had a moment of terrible clarity. I could see what I'd been handed in my own life, the intergenerational story I was carrying in my body alongside this child. I could see how much I didn't know. How alone I was in the particular way of this — not without love, but without guidance. Without a map. Without anyone who had stood exactly here and could tell me what came next.

And I made a decision. Not a soft or gentle one. A fierce one. The only possible one.

I don't know how I'm going to make this work. But I'm damn sure going to find a way. I'm going to protect this child. I'm going to make the world better for them. This intergenerational story — the one I was handed — stops here. I'm the one who changes it.

I didn't have anyone to tell me how. So I held that decision in my body, alongside everything else, and I carried it forward.

I should tell you who I am and how I got here, because it matters for what comes next.

I started rough. My childhood didn't hand me the maps that other people seemed to carry naturally — the ones that told you which rooms you were allowed to enter and which ones were never meant for you, how to speak when you got there, what you were worth. I spent years fighting my way out of the wrong rooms and into better ones I had to find on my own, learning the language after I arrived, making up for the start I didn't get.

I also didn't have a model for what I was trying to do. There was no one ahead of me in my own life who had faced hard things with courage and could show me how it was done. I had literature. I had the occasional grace of a good person appearing at the right moment. Mostly I had stubbornness and a very deep refusal to be the person who looked away from reality, from suffering, from unfairness.

And slowly, imperfectly, stubbornly — I built something. Work that meant something. A husband who was the great love of my life. Friends, chosen family. Belonging. A sense, finally, of having arrived somewhere solid.

I was told I couldn't have children. I lived through that — the grief of it, the medical odyssey, the particular cruelty of being made to feel lesser for something my body simply was. The heartache of not being able to have children stung more because of having finally made it, not less. Because after everything — after all the years of clawing toward something good — I had finally built a life worth welcoming a child into. And yet that wasn't an option for me. My husband and I tried everything. We explored adoption. We came to terms, slowly and imperfectly, with a life that looked different than we'd imagined. That specific grief — the grief of being so close and still unable — lived alongside all the other grief I carried.

We decided, in large part because we were a family of two adults, to move abroad.

Then the world ended.

First a bank collapse took our combined life's savings. A global pandemic. A severe lockdown in Central America, where we lived. And my husband — the absolute love of my life — disappearing. Strokes. Dementia. He became someone else, someone frightening, someone who was not him. I became his caretaker in isolation, grieving a person who was still alive, who would sometimes return to himself long enough to beg for help to die.

That beautiful life I had fought so hard to build — gone. Gone, gone, gone.

My support network existed almost entirely through my phone, thousands of miles away, in a country I couldn't return to. When I needed someone who could relate to where I was, who had survived, there was no one to call. I was truly on my own, in the way that means something, in the way that strips everything down to what you actually have inside you.

And then, impossibly, I got pregnant.

A miracle. A genuine miracle.

Also: high risk. Also: what the medical establishment so warmly calls geriatric. Also: scandalous, and navigated more alone than I'd imagined possible — isolated not just by circumstance but by the judgment of people I'd trusted. Turned away. Ostracized. My miracle looked only like a scarlet letter to most people I knew in this new country, and they felt morally obligated to ensure businesses stayed closed to me even as they reopened when pandemic restrictions were lifted.

So I stood there, looking at what I was bringing my baby into. Not the beautiful life I had so longed to welcome them into. The wreckage of it. I knew exactly how much I had lost. I knew exactly what I was facing. And I chose to become someone equal to this moment. There wasn't much of a choice, after all.

I paid attention to myself, to what I was learning in real time. I held my plight alongside so many others' around the world — all those who suffer, who struggle, who survive, who use their hardship for the betterment of others, believing that the great river of humanity carries me, too, even if there is no one here to help me along right now. I drew my strength from the earth. As I practiced my breathing, I visualized peace in, anxiety out. Strength in, weakness out. Courage in, fear out.

I went looking for resources, for help, because surely someone had made something for this. There were no doulas where I was, and I only found guidance for the physical, medical, and practical parts of pregnancy. I didn't find much tailored to older folks who are expecting. I didn't find anything for me beyond "Pregnancy can be a stressful time; be kind to yourself and practice self-care" or "Hormones can wreak havoc during pregnancy; talk to your doctor if you're having thoughts of harm."

Every resource had an unspoken edge of "Only the baby matters." Of course the baby matters, and surely matters the most to the pregnant person, more than to the doctors, midwives, doulas, and pregnancy-guide authors. But the single focus on a baby as a successful outcome of the pregnancy process didn't sit right in my soul. As an older person in a high-risk pregnancy, I worried every day if my baby would make it. What would that mean for me if my pregnancy had a different outcome? I guess I would be unenrolled from the resources I'd been able to find, left on my own, at what I imagine would have been one of the most vulnerable, traumatic, and deeply painful times in my life. I'm lucky I didn't find out where that path would lead.

What I did find as a practical guide that resonated with my general, well-earned mistrust of the Western medicine system — and I want to be careful about how I say this, because it wasn't malicious — wasn't built for my pregnancy. This guidance, widely trusted and well-meaning, told me what a good pregnancy looked like. It looked like avoiding interventions. It looked like a particular kind of birth.

In the part of the world where I gave birth, almost nothing from the guide translated anyway. And I had a C-section. I had to. And in the recovery room, in the fog of it, I felt something I shouldn't have felt: that I had done it wrong, that I had failed, that I had already deprived my child of important benefits, that I hadn't been strong enough to change the doctor's mind, that I missed my chance at a remarkable, awe-inspiring experience. That story about what birth should be had made my actual birth — the one that brought my child safely into the world and saw me survive to parent — feel like a lesser thing, like something to mourn instead of celebrate, like something to be ashamed of.

What I needed wasn't a blueprint for the right pregnancy. It was someone in my corner for my pregnancy. Come what may. Whatever it looked like. However it arrived.

A few years later, older still, I went looking again — this time for a possible second pregnancy, hoping something had emerged in the interim. The silence was still there.

So I built what should have existed, what I had needed most, what would have helped me in every facet of my life during one of the highest-stakes times of my life.

Three years. One course that became something I don't have a clean word for — a curriculum, a companion, a guide through the transformation that pregnancy actually is. It covers the practical things, yes — financial planning, navigating medical systems, the fourth trimester, returning to work — but always through an identity lens, always asking: Who are you becoming through this, and what do you need to carry that forward?

It includes journals — not just for the pregnant person, but for their partner, their children, the people who love them. Partner sections see the partner as a full person on this journey, not just as a support person. There are scripts for doctors and for hard conversations and for the moments nobody prepares you for. There is cultural context, because the story we're handed about pregnancy and parenthood is not the only story, and it shouldn't be the only lens. There are pathways to offer feedback to the institutions that shape your life. There are affirmations, frameworks, and Transformation Bridges — tools for identifying what to leave behind and what to carry forward.

And because I know that loss is part of this story for many people, there is a complete companion for anyone who experiences miscarriage, stillbirth, or the death of a baby. It's called Loving Legacies. It continues the work — the journals, the partner guidance, the practical and the profound — through grief, through memory-making, through returning to the world. It's offered freely to anyone who needs it, whether they've taken the course or not. No barrier. No cost. Just: I see you, and this offering is for you. You deserve every support.

I want to be honest about what the course I created is and isn't.

It won't tell you how your pregnancy should go. It has no interest in making you feel like you've done it wrong. It is not a blueprint for the right birth or the right parent or the right outcome.

What it will do is stand beside you through the transformation — whatever shape that takes.

Because here is what I believe, and what three years of building this has only deepened: a pregnancy that ends in loss is not a pregnancy that didn't matter, and the person you were becoming through it did not stop becoming. That work is real. It counts. You count.

And the person who comes out the other side of this — however it goes — has something to offer. Not just to a child, if a child comes. To their workplace. Their neighbors. Their community. The people they choose to love. The intergenerational story they decide, right here, to rewrite.

Pregnancy is awesome in the original sense of the word. It fills you with awe. It should. And that awe — that awakening — doesn't belong to any particular outcome. It belongs to you.

I'm not a therapist or a clinician. I'm someone who has lived authority on suffering, who has read everything I could get my hands on, who spent a decade building and teaching curriculum for people that institutions forgot, and who paid very close attention to my own transformation when there was no one else to ask.

I cobbled together literature and research and lived experience and a deep pull like gravity to help other people and stubbornness to insist that pregnant people deserve much deeper support than they're offered — and used my professional expertise in curriculum design and online learning to bring this course into the world so it can help people intentionally steer their becoming.

The course is called In Awe: A Guide Through Your Sacred Transformation. The Older Parents & Old Souls Edition, available now, is for older parents and old souls — people who came to this with history, with complexity, with eyes open. Further editions are coming for queer and trans parents, for parents of color, for parents navigating survival and resilience, and for parents living with disability or chronic illness — communities that have always done this transformative work without being centered or celebrated.

There is a free chapter. There is scholarship access — no application, no questions asked. There is a tier for those who want to support access for others. And there is Loving Legacies, always free, for anyone navigating loss.

You shouldn't have to navigate this alone. I made something so you don't have to.